troubleshooting vs chipsets.

ElfShotTheFood

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I recently got around to working on some nintendo vs boards that I have had for over a year. smb and hogans alley worked fine, excitebike and duck hunt did not. I tested the dh and eb chips in the known working boards.

please correct me if I am wrong with the next step in my testing theory.

the ppu chips control the colors? so if I try the duck hunt or excitebike ppu chips with smb or hogans alley I should get the game to come up with wrong colors, if the ppu chips are ok. from there I can be sure My roms are bad.

If the smb/ha does not work with the dh or eb ppu chips then I should assume the ppu is bad and then test the roms with a known working ppu from smb/ha and see what I get.

does all that make sense? is there an easier way to figure out the problem?

they all use the same cpu, right?

I am not that worried about getting excitebike to work, but I really want to play some duck hunt.

thanks.
 
Make sure the pins on the roms are clean and tight and lined up correctly. Don't use the sticker as reference, look for the u shape...that's pin 1.

Do you get anything when you plug in the eb/da roms? Like a solid color screen, or is it just black?

When my board went bad I got black screen. When my roms went bad I got a single colored screen.
 
Really!?

When I (thought) I had a bad set of Roms, I would get a solid white or purple screen.

Well, that gives me hope that my other board isnt bad, and its just the roms.

I have about 20 Vs. boards right now and most of them are working and populated with games. It has been a long road to get to this point. I have come to some conclusions and still feel like troubleshooting them is an absolute crap shoot. There are too many variables at work here.

I have had games work on some boards and not others. I have had some games not work with some games on the same board but work with other games on the same board. This might be crazy, but I think that some games don't like certain games sitting next to them on the board. Still not sure. I also think there might be a connection between certain games and the board version. There are about five different versions of the board.


I have found that if you get a solid colored screen I can usually get the came to work by swapping out CPUs. Sometimes I have tried 5-10 different CPUs before the board finally works. This has worked for me on more than one occasion. Or, It could have been a bad CPU socket and I finally made contact.

I always test the ROMs and they almost always check out. PPUs are rarely bad I have found. I think I have encountered one bad PPU out of about 40 or 50.

I think a lot of all the problems have to do with the ROM, CPU, and PPU sockets getting corroded. You are inserting a lot of chips into a board. If one of those legs doesn't make contact then the whole thing goes out the window. I have to find a sure fire way to solve this. It's always a crap shoot.

Sorry I didn't help. But, I feel the frustration with these boards.

Also, PPUs are completely interchangeable. They will work with any game, the colors will just be wrong if you use the wrong one.
 
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again.....sockets, sockets, sockets. An IC socket wasn't made to have a chip constantly being pulled out and inserted. It just weakens the spring tension and they stop making good contact with the chip. And if you have a VS. game with the daughter board.....and try to go back to a "regular" chipset setup, forget about it. Have you ever looked at the size of those big ass legs on those daughter boards. It totally stretches out the socket....making it unreliable (at best) once the daughter board is removed. Who knows how many chips/daughter boards have been shoved into these things over the years. After all, that was Nintendo's big selling point with this system.


If you want your VS. motherboard to be remotely reliable, (at a minimum) replace the PPU and CPU sockets....and stop switching games every week :)

Edward
 
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